WSJT (amateur radio software)

The program was initially written by Joe Taylor, K1JT, but is now open source and is developed by a small team.

The digital signal processing techniques in WSJT-X make it substantially easier for amateur radio operators to employ esoteric propagation modes, such as high-speed meteor scatter and moonbounce.

Although Joe Taylor was the original developer (and still acts as maintainer), several programmers are currently involved in writing the software.

[2] The bursts of signal created by such trails are commonly referred to as "pings", due to their characteristic sound.

Contacts may be made at almost any time (that is, a meteor shower is not required to be in progress) at distances of up to 1400 miles (2250 km).

JT65, developed and released in late 2003,[3] is intended for extremely weak but slowly varying signals, such as those found on troposcatter or Earth-Moon-Earth (EME, or "moonbounce") paths.

It is described as being designed for "multi-hop Es where signals may be weak and fading, openings may be short, and you want fast completion of reliable, confirmable QSO's".

According to Taylor, the important characteristics of FT8 are — Compared to the so-called "slow modes" (JT9, JT65, QRA64), FT8 is a few decibels less sensitive, but allows completion of QSOs four times faster.

Compared with the "fast modes" (JT9E-H), FT8 is significantly more sensitive, has much narrower bandwidth, uses the vertical waterfall, and offers multi-decoding over the full displayed passband.

[2] In 2019, Taylor, et al., introduced FT4, an experimental protocol which is similar to FT8 but has a shorter T/R sequence length for faster contest exchanges.

[16] An article series on using the original JT65-HF software appeared in CQ Amateur Radio's October[17] & November 2010[18] issues.

And MSHV [19] from LZ2HV recompiled from source code of WSJT-X with different GUI implementation both for Linux and Windows OS.

A waterfall plot for FT8 signals (bandwidth 50 Hz) in the 40-meter band and for JT65 on the right (bandwidth 180 Hz)